


Attacked and Killed

by Bluewolf458



Category: The Sentinel (TV)
Genre: Gen, Sentinel Thursday
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-20
Updated: 2020-02-20
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:48:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22821265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bluewolf458/pseuds/Bluewolf458
Summary: A financial adviser to the Mayor has been killed
Relationships: Jim Ellison & Blair Sandburg
Comments: 4
Kudos: 10





	Attacked and Killed

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Sentinel Thursday prompt 'attack'

Attacked and Killed

by Bluewolf

Jim sat dispiritedly reading the details - such as they were - that had been sent up from Homicide along with the case that the Mayor had passed on to Major Crime. At least this was a serious case, not one involving - to quote Blair at his most cynical - the Mayor's housekeeper's youngest son's dogwalker's second cousin's boyfriend's sister, who had lost a purse containing ten dollars.

This time, one of the Mayor's main financial aides had been killed. Attacked, killed and robbed.

Homicide Detective Palance clearly had little sympathy for the dead man. If what had been stolen had been - say - a valuable picture, yes, Palance would have been reasonably sympathetic; you buy a picture you like, paying $50,000 for it, and you hang it on the wall where you can see it - though Palance probably had little understanding of why anyone would want to pay that much for a picture. Even growing up in the house of a very wealthy man whose possessions included some quite valuable items, Jim couldn't really understand how a painting could possibly be worth that much. But to keep $50,000 in cash in the house - and not even in a safe, but in a drawer, depending on the stupidity of keeping it in such an insecure place to keep it safe... clearly, in Palance's opinion, that had been a measure of tax avoidance.

The Forensics report was fairly uninformative as well. The only fingerprints they had found were those of O'Brien himself, and his housekeeper. There was no sign of an actual break-in; it was as if O'Brien had opened the door and possibly even invited in the person who had killed him.

Jim sighed. He was as guilty as O'Brien of keeping too much money in the house, wanting the convenience of having it to hand - though he only had a fraction of Eamonn O'Brien's $50,000 in the house, and he did have it in a secure, well-hidden place. Not even Blair knew that Jim had roughly $5,000 tucked away in the loft. Oh, he trusted Blair, but what Blair didn't know couldn't be bullied out of him, no matter what threats were used. His total ignorance of there being any money - other than the, at most, couple of hundred to be found in two wallets - in the house would have been absolutely obvious.

Then he frowned slightly. How had Palance known that $50,000 had been stolen? He began to read through Palance's report again.

O'Brien's housekeeper had found the body when she arrived the previous morning - ah. On the first read through he had been concentrating on that. Now he looked at the details. The living room had been ransacked. There was a unit with shelves that were used to display items O'Brien had carved, two drawers and two cupboards under them where he kept his tools. The housekeeper had told Palance about the money that O'Brien kept in one of these drawers - in some ways, the obvious place to look first for any money kept in the house, and once found there was no need to look anywhere else - but every cupboard, every drawer, had been opened and its contents scattered, and even some of the things on shelves had been thrown onto the floor.

Not part of his income as a financial adviser, what was in the drawer was, Muriel Coburn said, money he had amassed from selling some of the things he had carved over the years - basically the income from nearly forty years of a well-paying hobby, possibly minus money used to buy more wood. She hadn't been sure of the exact amount of money involved, but knowing how much he charged for the items he carved and how many she knew he had sold over the years that she had been working for him, she thought that $50,000 was a fairly close estimate.

It wasn't actually tax avoidance, Jim decided, more a case of keeping his two incomes separate. Though why O'Brien couldn't have had a different account for his hobby income...

Jim sighed. He was going to have to speak to the housekeeper himself. But, he decided, he would wait until the afternoon, when Blair could go with him.

***

Noon arrived, and with it, his partner. Blair took one look at Jim's face and sighed. "What's the problem?"

"Case passed to us from Homicide - "

"Courtesy of the Mayor?" Blair guessed.

"Yes - but this time it's serious. The Mayor's financial adviser's been killed. The housekeeper found him yesterday morning. I've got the statement Palance in Homicide got from her - "

"But of course you'll need to speak to her yourself. Palance won't like that."

"No, he won't. He doesn't see any need to interview a witness more than once."

"Well, even you have said to someone a few times, 'I don't think we'll need to speak to you again'."

"I know, but Chief, some 'witnesses' have seen so little it's hardly worth getting a statement from them at all."

Blair grinned, apparently accepting the comment at face value while knowing that when he said 'seen' Jim also meant 'noticed'. In his time riding with Jim, Blair had come to realize that although he himself was a close observer of things and could describe what he saw in almost superfluous detail, some people could barely register the presence of a big spider dangling six inches in front of their noses. And if the witness was a child, Jim's protective instinct meant he didn't want to put the child through the trauma of describing what he - or she - had seen (or experienced) more than once.

Jim shut off his computer, stood and reached for his jacket. "Come on Chief - lunch, then we'll go in search of O'Brien's housekeeper."

"I hope you're not thinking of Wonderburger." Blair's voice lingered in Major Crime after the door closed, and Rafe and Brown grinned at each other, knowing that although Jim might have been thinking of Wonderburger, Blair was unlikely to let him stop there. And if he was honest, Rafe knew that he secretly agreed with Blair's opinion. Burgers were not his food of choice either.

***

Lunch was eaten at a small cafe near Rainier, which just happened to be on the direct route to Eamonn O'Brien's house. Then Jim and Blair went on to the house, knowing that the housekeeper had been kept on to clean everything before O'Brien's nephew (and heir) put the place on the market.

Jim rang the bell and, sure enough, the door was opened in response inside seconds.

"Miss Coburn? Detective Ellison, Cascade PD, and my associate, Consultant Sandburg. I know you spoke to Detective Palance, but the case has been transferred to Major Crime, so I need to speak to you about what you found."

"Oh... Yes, Detective. Come in."

There was a nervousness about her that triggered Jim's senses, and as he followed her into the house he concentrated on her reactions.

She took them into a kitchen. "Sorry about this," she said, "but the living room is still a shambles. Whoever broke in made a real mess of the room; it'll take me two or three days to tidy it all. I've been concentrating on cleaning the rest of the house. Once that's done I'll tackle the living room."

"According to Detective Palance, you aren't a live-in housekeeper?" Jim said.

"No. Mr. O'Brien preferred to live on his own."

"What hours do you work?" Blair asked, smoothly taking over the questioning.

"Eight till five, five days a week. I sometimes work eight to twelve on a Saturday as well. But I'll only be here until I get everything tidied up and cleaned - at most, till the end of next week."

"So yesterday you arrived at eight - "

"Well, about five to eight," she said.

"So that you could actually start at eight. Yes, of course. Can you tell us what you did when you arrived? I suppose it was the same every morning?"

"Yes. I went to the living room to let Mr. O'Brien know I'd arrived... and he was lying there, with everything scattered around him... "

"Did you touch him?"

"I... yes. I could see he'd bled quite a lot, but that didn't automatically mean he was dead, he might just have been unconscious... but he was quite cold, and he'd stopped bleeding, so I phoned for the police... " She was looking very shaken.

"The day before - you left at your usual time, and everything was normal?" Jim asked, and noted her suddenly increased heart rate.

"Yes."

"The medical examiner put the time of death at around forty-eight hours ago. That would have meant he was killed at some point during the morning of the day before yesterday."

Muriel Coburn's heart rate increased even more.

"Why did you kill him?" Jim asked. "If it was just to steal the money, you could have taken it almost any time - he might have suspected you and fired you, but that's unlikely after the length of time you've been working for him. So why kill him?"

She collapsed in tears. After a minute she pulled herself together. "I didn't realize anyone could tell how long someone had been dead - not after maybe a day."

"You'd be surprised how much detail a medical examiner can use to determine the time of death," Jim said, his voice surprisingly gentle. "But why? You'd worked for Mr. O'Brien for years. Why suddenly attack and kill him?"

"I'm divorced," she said. "My husband was very abusive, beating up both me and our daughter even though she was still a toddler. After the divorce I went back to using my own name, and moved here - I used to live in New York - and insisted on being called 'Miss' even though I had sole custody of our daughter, and having her made me look like an unmarried mother.

"Two days ago... Two days ago I brought Viola to work with me - she had the day off school and there was a cleaning job I planned that really needed two people. Mr. O'Brien... When he saw Viola, he tried to persuade her to go upstairs with him... Detective, she's not quite sixteen! I knew what he was planning and objected, told her to go home. He told her no, to go upstairs... told me that if I tried to stop him, he'd fire me and make sure I couldn't get another job. That didn't worry me, he paid well and I've saved a lot over the twelve years I worked for him, but I had to protect her! So I grabbed one of his tools - he always had one or two lying around - and hit him. As soon as he fell, I told her to get out, go home... She did, and I... I checked him, saw that he was dead... so I made it look as if someone had broken in, searched the place... I took the money from the drawer but I wasn't meaning to keep it - I'm not a thief! I was going to give it to charity.

"I had to protect Viola," she repeated. "I don't know if he made a habit of targeting young girls or if he just had an attack of lust when he saw her... but I couldn't let him... I don't know whether to say 'rape' or 'seduce' her."

Jim nodded. "I do understand," he said, "but - Muriel Coburn, you are under arrest for the murder of Eamonn O'Brien."

***

The Mayor would not be happy, especially since Jim had no intention of keeping the killer's motive - protection of an under-age girl from a pedophile - secret.

"But it might persuade him that getting 'the best' to investigate crimes isn't always a good idea," Blair commented. "If it had been left with Palance, the killing would probably have remained unsolved."


End file.
